AND
another thing... THE DEADBEAT BRAND BY BRUCE TURKEL
Have you ever witnessed the Pocket Pat? When done well it’s a thing of beauty. I was invited to lunch by Lloyd. He’s a successful businessman and wired into the goings-on in South Florida. When the bill came, Lloyd made a flourish of snatching the check and announced it was his treat. He examined the charge and reached for his billfold. Lloyd looked up at me with a look of abject horror as he patted each of the pockets in his suit. “I must have left my billfold on my dresser,” he said. “I’m so sorry. It was my treat.” “Was” clearly was the key word. I handed the waiter my credit card. Months later, Lloyd called me to get together for lunch again. Now I might be crazy but I’m not stupid, and I really didn’t relish getting together with him again. After all, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice — well, you know what happens then. But Lloyd reminded me that he owed me lunch and it was his treat. He’d be sure to remember his wallet. Okay, so maybe he really did forget his wallet. I forget things all the time. It could happen to anyone. Near the end of the meal, Lloyd answered a call on his cellphone. After listening to the phone his face drained of all color. “Oh my God, I’ll be right there,” he said as he hung up. He mumbled something about an emergency, threw a bill on the table, and ran off. When I looked down, I found a dollar laying there. “He must have meant to leave more,” I thought, “but was clearly distracted. An honest mistake.” I paid the other 27 bucks. Stupidly, I agreed to have lunch with him again a few months later. Not because I wanted to pay a third time, but because I needed to ask him about a particular piece of business. Plus, I figured he’d already exhausted his bag of tricks and wouldn’t dare try to shaft me again. But you know what they say about fighting with a pig. They’ll just pull you down to their level and cover you with mud. Plus, the pig enjoys it. This time I was in a hurry and told Lloyd, who I was now referring to as Pocket Pat that I had a hard stop at 12:50. We picked a cashonly sandwich
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shop near my office. Service was slow and we didn’t get done until almost 1:00, so when the $17 bill came I was really in a hurry. Pocket Pat again made a flourish of pulling out his billfold, but wouldn’t you know it, all he had was a hundred. Well, we could always wait for the waiter to get change (I was now 15 minutes late). I threw a twenty on the table and rushed off. Am I telling you this because I enjoy telling people that I’m a chump? Hardly. As Dov Seidman writes in his book How, “How you do anything is how you do everything,” and needless to say, I’m not the only one Pocket Pat has snookered. And being the gossipy little biatches we are, we talk about it. So Pocket Pat is known around town as a conniving deadbeat. That’s his brand. Brands are created whether you decide to build them carefully and compulsively or do nothing at all. But you only have so much control over what people think of your brand to begin with. If you’re not scrupulously managing your messaging and activities, you’re abdicating responsibility to forces outside your control, many of which are eager to see you fail — or at least laugh at you behind your back. Saab didn’t control their brand. Instead of consistently standing for something emotional and focused they kept searching for meaning. And while Volvo became one of the most profitable European brands in the United States, Saab has been passed from hand to hand and may or may not be out of business by the time you read this. Sarah Palin didn’t control her brand. Given the opportunity to run for one of the most powerful offices in the world, she didn’t prepare for news interviews. Instead she watched her public persona dwindle from superstar to question mark to laughing stock. Sure, she built a name for herself and put some money in the bank, but at what cost? Puerto Rico didn’t control its brand. Once one of the most desirable tropical tourist destinations, years of inconsistent messaging and an island-wide obsession with the Statehood vs. Commonwealth fight eroded the brand so thoroughly that the Dominican Republic has eaten PR’s lunch, fufu and all. Like Pocket Pat, these brands lost market share because their actions were not in lockstep with their messaging and chipped away at their marketability. Quite simply, people don’t buy what you do, they buy who you are. And if the who you are does not present people with a consistent and compelling image of what’s in it for them, they won’t buy at all. Unless it’s lunch. And you’re with Pocket Pat. Bruce is a branding expert who makes his clients’ brand experiences more valuable. He’s worked with great organizations including Discovery Channel, Baptist Health, MetCare, and Miami. He’s spoken at MIT, Harvard, and hundreds of conferences. He’s been on NPR and CNN and featured in The New York Times and Fast Company Magazine. He has published three books on advertising including Building Brand Value. LP